One of the biggest mistakes that family and professional caregivers can make when caring for a person who has dementia is to assume that their personality and experiences have been wiped clean, essentially giving their life a clean slate; it has not. A senior who has dementia is still the same person at their core, even if they drift in and out of memories at times.

You may have a loved one or know someone suffering from Alzheimer’s as there are 5.7 million Americans currently living with the disease. Alzheimer’s and other dementias have many unique challenges that can affect seniors in different ways such as sundowning. Sundowning is a symptom for people with Alzheimer’s or other dementias that has multiple causes and displays differently for each individual. Sundowning can be alarming for the seniors who experience it, and for their families and caregivers who witness it happening.

This post will introduce you to a series of potential strategies you can use to decrease the magnitude of these challenges, offering suggestions to manage the symptoms of sundown syndrome to lessen the sense of apprehension that each day's sunset might be bringing you.

This post has been designed to prepare you for the realities of Alzheimer’s disease. There are many commonalities that are important to understand, even though everyone does experience the disease in their own way and pace.

Making daily life easier for your parent living with dementia can make things so much easier for your parent, you, and everyone else involved. Here are several things you can do to help your loved one.

The various forms and types of dementia are terrible, debilitating conditions. Even worse, there is very little known about these conditions, so treatment and management options are, in many cases, very limited. Fortunately for dementia sufferers and their families, there is proof that music therapy can have a significant, positive impact on symptoms and quality of life.

As we are not equipped to automatically compensate for dementia, we can end up unconsciously sabotaging the relationship by having erroneous expectations of what communication should look like. When it fails to meet our expectations, we get frustrated, hurt, and even angry at the other individual, who lacks the ability to understand what has gone wrong. Yet connection with our loved ones is essential – for them and us.